Hardware specs

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I have been asked to build a system for a customer but it is up to me to choose the specs.

The customer has said that he wan't the hard drive accessing to be as fast I can get it but he only needs upto 500GB. My question is do I go for a couple of 250GB drives and set it up in raid, 1 500GB drive or a few solid state drives?

The rest of the setup is completed

Asus P6T Intel X58
Corsair XMS3 12GB DDR3 PC3-10666C9
Intel Core i7 920

the customers budget after all of the other components still has £300 to spare for the drives(s)

 

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What does the customer want the PC for ? Will they be doing mostly reads or writes ? Will they be doing random accesses or sequential ?

Maybe throw in a Vertex SSD and a cheap 1TB HD like Western Digital Green or Samsung Spinpoint F1.

Or get one of these :- http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-077-SA&tool=3

Or read this :- http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=2

 

THe customer is going to use it for gaming and have a virtual setup on it but I am not sure which virtualization software he is going to be using.

Thanks for the links and suggestions.

 

A raid 0 setup will get you some 'pretty' benchmark scores, but won't make much difference to real world speeds unless you have a decent raid controller. Most onboard controllers ain't that hot though really.

The latest Intel SSD's are meant to be very fast, but you will end up paying a lot. One of these ( http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=459 ) WD Velociraptor 300GB + A Samsung F1 1TB Spinpoint would be probably the most cost effective high speed solution.

 

Cheers I was looking at one of those velociraptors. I might just do it that way as they are quite quick.

 

Actually RAID0 performance of the Intel ICH10R is supposed to be quite good. More than good enough for a couple of cheap SSD's or Velociraptors in RAID0.

However a single Vertex SSD will probably be better than most cheaper two SSD Raid0 solutions for general use.

 

This might be more your price level and couple it with a standard harddisk mentioned above should do the trick.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-078-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1427